Isnin, 26 November 2012

Farmasi Besar nafikan Ubat Kanser

Is
Big Pharma Ignoring a Potential Cancer Cure?

Published May 18, 2011

On
April 12, 1955, the first successful polio vaccine was administered to almost 2
million schoolchildren around the country. Its discoverer, University of
Pittsburgh medical researcher Jonas Salk, was interviewed on CBS Radio that
evening. "Who owns the patent on this vaccine?" radio host Edward R.
Murrow asked him. It was a reasonable question, considering that immunity to a deadly disease that afflicted 300,000 Americans annually
ought to be worth something. "Well, the people, I would say," Salk
famously replied. "There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?" In
a world where the cancer drug Avastin — patented by the pharmaceutical company
Genentech/Roche — costs patients about $80,000 per year without having been
proven to extend lives, Salk's selflessness has made him the hero of many
medical researchers today.

One
of Salk's admirers is Evangelos Michelakis, a cancer researcher at the
University of Alberta who, three years ago, discovered that a common, nontoxic
chemical known as DCA, short for dichloroacetate, seems to inhibit the growth
of cancerous tumors in mice. Michelakis' initial findings garnered much
fanfare at the time and have recirculated on the Web again this week, in large
part because of a blog post ("Scientists cure cancer, but no one takes
notice") that ignited fresh debate with people wondering if it was true.

The
mechanism by which DCA works in mice is remarkably simple: It killed most types
of cancer cells by disrupting the way they metabolize sugar, causing them to self-destruct without
adversely affecting normal tissues.

Following
the animal trials, Michelakis and his colleagues did tests of DCA on human
cancer cells in a Petri dish, then conducted human clinical trials using $1.5
million in privately raised funds. His encouraging results — DCA treatment
appeared to extend the lives of four of the five study participants — were
published last year in Science Translational Medicine.

The
preliminary work in rodents, cell cultures, and small trials on humans points
to DCA as being a powerful cancer treatment. That doesn't mean it's the
long-awaited cure — many other compounds have seemed similarly promising in the
early stages of research without later living up to that promise — but
nonetheless, Michelakis believes larger human trials on DCA are warranted.

Like
Jonas Salk, Michelakis hasn't patented his discovery. It's not because he
doesn't want to, but because he can't. When it comes to patents, DCA really is
like the sun: It's a cheap, widely used chemical that no one can own.

In
today's world, such drugs don't readily attract funding.

Pharmaceutical
companies are not exactly ignoring DCA, and they definitely aren't suppressing
DCA research — it's just that they're not helping it. Why? Drug development is
ultimately a business, and investing in the drug simply isn't a good business
move. "Big Pharma has no interest whatsoever in investing [in DCA
research] because there will be no profit," Michelakis told Life's Little
Mysteries,a sister site to LiveScience. [Countdown: Top 10 Worst Hereditary Conditions]

The long road to a cure

Pharmacologist
Omudhome Ogbru, an R&D director at a New Jersey-based pharmaceutical
business, The Medicines Company, notes, "Drug companies are like other
companies in that they manufacture products that must be sold for a profit in
order for the company to survive and grow." Only one in 10,000 compounds
studied by researchers ends up as an approved drug, Ogbru explained in an op-ed
at MedicineNet. To get to the approval phase, drugs must undergo seven to 10
years of testing at a total cost averaging $500 million — all of which can be
for naught if the drug doesn't receive Food and Drug Administration approval.
Even if it does, "only three out of every 20 approved drugs bring in
sufficient revenue to cover their developmental costs."

"Profit
is the incentive for the risk that the company takes," Ogbru wrote.
"Without the promise of a reasonable profit, there is very little
incentive for any company to develop new drugs." It would be nearly
impossible to make a profit on a drug like dichloroacetate. "If DCA proves
to be effective, then it will be a ridiculously cheap drug," Michelakis
said.

Daniel
Chang, an oncologist at the Stanford Cancer Center who recently began looking
into DCA, concurred. "I'm sure the lack of patentability is playing a role
in the lack of investigation," Chang told us in an email. While government
health organizations like the National Cancer Institute give research grants to
help fund clinical trials, "those would never be enough to get DCA
approved as a cancer treatment," said Akban Kahn, a Toronto doctor.
"You need hundreds of millions of dollars, and a government grant is not
that big." DCA research has moved along much more slowly than if a drug
company were footing the bill. That said, grassroots funding has allowed
surprisingly steady progress. "Through the website, radio, phone calls,
things like that, we raised about $1.5 million in nine months" at the
University of Alberta DCA Research Center, Michelakis said. This was enough to
fund a detailed study of DCA treatment in five brain cancer patients.

The
results were promising. The study, however, was small and lacked a placebo control, making it impossible to say for sure
whether the patients' conditions improved because of the DCA treatment or
because of something else. Daniel Chang, the Stanford researcher, described the
study's results as interesting but inconclusive. In their paper, Michelakis and
his co-authors wrote, "With the small number of treated participants in
our study, no firm conclusions regarding DCA as a therapy … can be made."

Despite
the dearth of clinical tests, one family practitioner, Akbar Khan of Medicor
Cancer Centre in Toronto, prescribes off-label DCA to his cancer patients. (He
says this can be done in Canada because DCA is already approved there for
treating certain metabolism disorders. Michelakis, however, said he does not
think Khan should be prescribing the drug before it is officially approved for
cancer use.) "We are seeing about 60 to 70 percent of patients who have
failed standard treatments respond favorably to DCA," Khan told Life's Little
Mysteries. Khan's group just published its first
peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. "It's a case
report of a patient with a rare form of cancer who had tried other treatments
that weren't working, so he came to us for DCA.

It
was effective, and actually it's quite a dramatic result. He had multiple
tumors, including a particularly troubling one in his leg. DCA stabilized the
tumor and significant reduced his pain. "We currently have three patients
with incurable cancers who are in complete remission, and are likely cured,
from using DCA in combination with conventional palliative (non-curative)
treatments. We are in the process of publishing these cases," he said.
[Countdown: Top 10 Mysterious Diseases]

A new drug model

Small trials and case studies won't be enough, however, to prove DCA works.
Further investigation into the drug's efficacy is necessary, and without the
help of Big Pharma, it will have to happen in an unusual way.

"This
could be a social experiment where the public funds these trials,"
Michelakis said. "After discovering the effect of DCA on cancer cells, I
consider this the second-biggest achievement of our work: when we showed that
you can bring a drug to human trials without a lot of money. If others were
inspired" — his group is beginning to establish collaborations with some
prominent cancer hospitals —"this could be a major achievement. Eventually
the federal bodies like the National Cancer Institute would see there is enough
evidence, and then they'll help with funding." "It represents a new
attitude and a new way of thinking," he added. Perhaps not entirely new.
For inspiration and encouragement, Michelakis often recalls the story of the
polio vaccine: "It succeeded in eradicating a deadly disease without
making a profit."
Editor's Note: This story and headline were updated May 18 to remove any
impression that Big Pharma is to blame for the lack of research into DCA. In
fact, as the story stated, the lack of financial incentive (the inability to
patent DCA) is what discourages drug companies from studying the chemicals.

Cure for Cancer discovered and
being suppressed – learn about the conspiracy governing the medical &
pharmaceutical industry, where money is more important than lives. This
documentary reveals the truth about cancer cures, how successful it is, and how
it is being covered up and lied about in the public and to the masses. If our
society has come so far as to land men on the moon, to split atoms, and to derive
power from the energy of the nucleus itself, then doesn’t it seem unlikely that
we have not yet found a cure for cancer? With the amount of money poured into
this field of research, and the amount of brilliant people working on it, some
argue, a cure should have been created by now. Some argue the cancer research
industry has conspired to conceal cures they have already discovered. Because
very little money can come from a treatment that cannot be patented, the
funding these researchers receive could be more lucrative for pharmaceutical
companies than finding an actual cure. Cancer is ‘Big Business,’ and they are
not interested in any approach that could potentially threaten their profits
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